Towards an Augmented Reality Cognitive Orthosis to Assist people with Alzheimer's disease: Preliminary Design

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common cause of neurocognitive disorder in aging. The main impacted activities are instrumental activities of daily living (IADL). Assistance to perform IADL can help people with AD (PwAD) to stay independent longer and live at home. Such assistance can be provided remotely from a caregiver to perform certain tasks using a shared visual representation, where, for instance, audio cues by phone are not sufficient. This paper presents a preliminary design and evaluation of a system to provide a remote assistance from a caregiver to a PwAD who needs assistance, by using a shared visual representation with the caregiver. The PwAD wears an augmented reality head-mounted display and the caregiver can see his environment and add annotations in it through a desktop interface. A preliminary usability and cognitive load study with healthy adults show encouraging results, but several aspects have to be refined.